“Casing” Entrepreneurship in Vancouver

Grant program: Teaching and Learning Development Grant (TLDG)

Grant recipient: Jan Kietzmann, Beedie School of Business, Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Project team: Karen Robson, Adam Mills, and Jeannette Paschen, research assistants

Timeframe: April 2015 to August 2016

Funding: $10,000  

Course addressed: BUS 714 – Entrepreneurship

Final Report: View Jan Kietzmann's project final report case study (PDF), teaching notes (PDF) and final report (PDF)

Description: I teach undergraduate and graduate courses on managing “Innovation” and “Entrepreneurship.” These courses are unlike many of our other business courses because in Innovation and in Entrepreneurship, there are often no correct or incorrect solutions, and there are few hard rules. “It depends” is often the best answer, and learning mainly takes place through discussion of the factors that impact the firm. For such learning objectives, the use of case-teaching is becoming an increasingly popular method. Case-teaching immerses students in realistic business situations by telling real stories about entrepreneurs. These narratives often include incomplete information, time constraints, and conflicting goals that students can discuss.

For teaching entrepreneurship in Vancouver, existing cases from large publishers such as Harvard Business School Publishing or Ivey Publishing are limited for since they only enable fruitful discussions of general entrepreneurship topics. However, not all Entrepreneurship topics are highly generalizable; in fact, many aspects of Entrepreneurship are highly context-dependent. For instance, most existing Entrepreneurship teaching-cases focus on start-ups in the United States. These Entrepreneurship experiences differ dramatically from what the local BC context

In this project, I plan to design and test a theoretically rigorous and practically relevant teaching-case that specifically introduces the local Vancouver context to our students, so that they graduate from our university well-prepared for the real world they will enter.         

Project Steps:

• Literature and information gathering to inform initial teaching-case
• Development of teaching-case
• Pilot test and gather feedback on teaching-case
• Revision of the teaching-case

Knowledge sharing: I have colleagues who also teach entrepreneurship at SFU and other local educational institutions. I will use this network throughout my project for feedback and input. It is also my intention to publish the cases once they have been piloted and revised.

Paschen, J., Paschen, U., & Kietzmann, J. H. (2016). À votre santé-conceptualizing the AO typology for luxury wine and spirits. International Journal of Wine Business Research, 28(2), 170-186. doi: 10.1108/IJWBR-09-2015-0041